Your second week is focused on getting you familiar with the common features of the UNIX system environment. While sometimes arcane, these features are an interface to extremely powerful and important tools, underlying a lot of modern development. You will be learning to understand the shell itself, the composability of UNIX commands through pipes, and the user and group permissions that govern access to files, directories and executables.
A common issue at this stage of the unit is students stumbling over some aspect of 'where' they are in their filesystem, or 'who' they are when executing commands. These are very important, so learn to pay attention to what the shell is telling you.
There are some substantial topics to introduce here, so there's a lot of material we're explaining in advance. We don't advise watching all of this in one go -- instead, watch the videos on a topic and then look ahead at the corresponding exercise to see if you understand how to apply it. It's also a good idea to break your preparation up into two or three sesssions.
| Video | Length | Slides |
|---|---|---|
| The shell | 30 minutes | slides |
| Permissions | 20 minutes | slides |
| Shell scripting 1 | 17 minutes | slides |
| Shell scripting 2 | 21 minutes | slides |
| Pipes 1 | 20 minutes | slides |
| Pipes 2 | 30 minutes | slides |